tamara ke: we do not have to worry about the thieves

 “Everlastingly unfolding dynamic, something ex-static. Potlatch. Anarchy in a new way – to treat this world as one, undivided gulp. Where vital wind of unlimited desire joins pain and pleasure, deprived word and psalm, dark abyss and transparency of the heights of mountains. Here, within this new world castles are built out of boiling magma and we are knights of desire – able to turn colors into substance of seduction. This new desire chants with the most precious lyrics ever: ‘Remember only what you easily can forget.’ Not political, beyond social or linguistic, this is anarchy of (nomadian) consciousness.” — TKE

TKE's colors are hallucinatory spectra. Thieves might avoid her grids; these images could be traps. A faux-naive touch recalls Sonia Delaunay channelled through A. R. Penck. Something like the back of Philip Guston's head re-genders as a bit(ten) player in a sad play about clowns. The Tarot may be in order.  An egret casts an aura of salvation over the loss of a child by drowning, or drawing. Tamara is evading the curatoriat. She's in a game of hide and sink.  Things submerge in the 'sticky sublime' of her oil-gashes.  She doesn't take 'no' for an answer. 

Tamara's oil stick drawings from the project 'we do not have to worry about thieves' were installed along a black tape/white wall grid--almost like a geologic timeline-- for the exhibition "Disoriented Orientation/Oriented Disorientation," at Wharton+Espinoza, Los Angeles, November 15 to January 4, 2013. To the Pharmakon Library, she is contributing these four images, which as drawings are oil on paper, 18 x 12 inches each.

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Tamara K.E. was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, and lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her master’s degree from Academy of Art Düsseldorf (2002). She represented Georgia in the 50^th Venice Biennial and the 1^st Prague Biennial in 2003. She has participated in museum shows that include Kunsthalle Hamburg (Hamburg), CoBrA Museum (Amsterdam), Daimler Contemporary (Berlin), House of Artists (Moscow), Van der Heydt Museum (Wuppertal), Museum für Neue Kunst (Freiburg), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Oostende), Sprengel Museum (Hannover), Suermondt-Ludwig Museum (Aachen), and Museum am Ostwall (Dortmund).

Shana Moulton: Green Screen Glorious Cure

  "Of all the changes of language a traveler in distant lands must face, none equals that which awaits him in the city of Hypatia, because the change regards not words, but things. I entered Hypatia one morning, a magnolia garden was reflected in blue lagoons, I walked among the hedges, sure I would discover young and beautiful ladies bathing; but at the bottom of the water, crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks, their hair green with seaweed."  - Italo Calvino, Cities and Signs 4, Invisible Cities

Hypatia, a Neoplatonist mathematician, inventor and philosopher b. 370 AD) was the librarian of the Alexandria Library in Egypt. She was murdered by Christian fanatics led by the patriarch Cyril in 415, on the pretext that her death would quell the Neoplatonic political and religious opposition to Christianity in the city. "The fanatics caught Hypatia on her way to the University. They proceeded to pull Hypatia from her chariot, strip her naked, drag her to the church, butcher her into pieces, and then burn her body." Her mathematical treatises, written for her students, survive in fragments.

Hypatia is reborn fragment by fragment in the Pharmakon LIbrary.  At the moment, in a rebirth of restless signs. Shana Moulton changes them up in her new video, Restless Leg (2012). Logos used to mean 'word', now it may mean nothing more than a sign for a brand. Shana Moulton's alter-ego dreams of a cure...

To the Pharmakon Library, Shana offers two image composites. The first she compiled from commercial and non-profit marketing logos that associate women's wellness and potential life-enhancements with geometries of flow and a recreational palette; she first published these fragments as a suite for the IMG_MGMT series on ArtFagCity.

images courtesy Shana Moulton

The second is a trio of video stills from Restless Leg Saga (2012). Shana Moulton's video (together with a video  from her "Whispering Pines" suite of 2006), appears within the exhibition "Disoriented Orientation / Oriented Disorientation" at Wharton+Espinoza through January 4, 2013. 

Shana Moulton's 'cure' takes animation to the invisible city of Hypatia. The suicides' green eyes, from the bottom of the lagoon, emblazon a green screen, or is it algae, coating the surface of the azure.  At the surface of the lagoon, the green screen, laid like a blanket of life, warms the temperature of another room where Shana's alter ego waits in anxious desperation.  Animation becomes elemental.  The glorious body may appear.

Shana Moulton, installation view, Restless Leg Saga (left) and Whispering Pines (right) at Wharton+Espinoza, Los Angeles 2012. Images courtesy of Wharton+Espinoza.

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Shana Moulton earned her BA from UC Berkeley in Art and Anthropology and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Moulton has exhibited/performed at The New Museum, SF MOMA, MoMA P.S.1, Performa 2009, Electronic Arts Intermix, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Wiels Center for Contemporary Art (Brussels), The Migros Museum (Zurich), De Appel (Amsterdam), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo), The Times Museum (Guangzhou), and The 29th Ljubljana Biennial.

Claudia Hart: Food for Children

Claudia Hart
The Real and The Fake series are a set of still-life photographs that contemplate the death of food. They are Hartʼs response to surreal trips down the aisles of her local supermarket, where the opportunity to buy anything that is not highly artificial or toxic is severely limited. The Real and The Fake photos are classical still lives of nutritionally-empty industrial snack-foods that nevertheless have appealing Platonic forms. Photos of these fake real foods are integrated with obviously simulated computer graphics of apples. In these images, the real and the fake implode.They are representations that are fake but seem real, and are real but seem fake. Their style is also a hybrid, bridging between classical still-life painting - Cezanne's apples! - and an industrial product shot.

images courtesy the artist and bitforms gallery new york

Claudia Hart (b. 1955, New York) has been active as an artist, curator and critic since 1988. She creates virtual paintings that take the form of 3-D imagery integrated into photography, animated loops, and multi-channel animation installations.

Hart’s recent solo exhibition at bitforms,  When A Rose is Not a Rose, reflects on the Gertrude Stein poem of the same name (1913) and explores the artist’s own denial of death.